"They are loving people, without covetousness….They love their
neighbors as themselves, and their speech is the sweetest and gentlest in
the world."

Christopher Columbus

"They.....brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many
other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells.
They willingly traded everything they owned....They were well-built, with
good bodies and handsome features....They do not bear arms, and do not know
them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves
out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane....They
would make fine servants....With fifty men we could subjugate them all and
make them do whatever we want."

Christopher Columbus

"We found the people most gentle, loving and faithful, void of all
guile and treason, and such as live after the manner of the golden
age."

Sir
Walter Raleigh

"And when we entered the city.....the sight of the palaces in which they
lodged us! They were very spacious and well built, of magnificent stone,
cedar wood, and the wood of other sweet-smelling trees, with great rooms and
courts, which were a wonderful sight, and all covered with awnings of woven
cotton.

When we had a good look at all this, we went to the orchards
and gardens, which was a marvelous place both to see and walk in....The
Caciques of that town.....brought us a present of gold worth more than two
thousand pesos; and Cortes thanked them heartily for it.....telling them
through our interpreter something about our holy faith, and declaring to
them the great power of our lord the Emperor."

-Bernal Diaz The Conquest of New Spain (1568)

"They were all keen, athletic young men, tall and lean and brave, and I
admired them as real specimens of manhood more than any body of men I have
ever seen before or since. they were perfectly adapted to their environment,
and knew just what to do in every emergency and when to do it, without any
confusion or lost motion. Their poise and dignity were superb; no royal
person ever had more assured manners manners. I watched their every movement
and learned lessons from them that later saved my life many times on the
prairie."

-Lt. Scott Some memories of a Soldier

"Marriage laws are non-existent: men and women alike choose their
mates and leave them as they please, without offense, jealousy or anger.
They multiply in great abundance; pregnant women work to the last minute and
give birth almost painlessly; up the next day, they bathe in the river and
are as clean and healthy as before giving birth. If they tire of their men,
they give themselves abortions with herbs and force stillbirths, covering
their shameful parts with leaves or cotton cloth; although on the whole,
Indian men and women look upon total nakedness with as much casualness as we
look upon a man's head or at his hands."

Bertolome Las Casas

"They all had their cheeks swollen out with a green herb inside,
which they were constantly chewing like beasts, so they could scarcely utter
speech: and each one had upon his neck two dried gourds, one of which was
full of that herb which they kept in their mouths, and the other full of a
white flour, which looked like powdered chalk, and from time to time, with a
small stick which they kept moistening in their mouths, they dipped it into
the flour and then put it into their mouths in both cheeks, thus mixing with
flour the herb which they had in their mouths: and this they did very
frequently. And marveling at such a thing, we were unable to comprehend
their secret, nor with what object they acted thus."

Vespucci (Letter to Pier Soderini,pub. 1504)

"The Indians eat human flesh and are sodomites and shoot arrows
poisoned with herbs....and....live from the the said Gulf of Uraba or point
called Caribana westwards, and it is also a coast with cliffs and they eat
human flesh, and they are abominable sodomites...."

de Ovieda (1526)

"The hideously embarrassing fact is that North America’s very
first colonists had decided to become wild men. European vagabonds
transmuted themselves into Noble Savages, said goodbye to Occult Imperialism
and the miseries of civilization, and took to the forest."

Gone to Croatan edited by Ron Sakolsky

"The history of the border White man’s connection with the Indians
is a sickening record of murder, outrage, robbery and wrongs committed by
the former, as the rule, and occasional savage outbreaks and unspeakably
barbarous deeds of retaliation by the latter, as the exception."

Presidents Commission 1869

"Bouquet and Amherst concocted the idea of sending the
Indians blankets and handkerchiefs impregnated with smallpox. Proposing this
biological warfare, Bouquet wrote to the commander-in-chief: 'I will try to inoculate
the Indians by means of Blankets that may fall in their hands, taking care
however not to get the disease myself. As it is a pity to oppose good men
against them, I wish we could make use of the Spaniard's Method, and hunt
them with English Dogs supported by Rangers, and some Light Horse, who would
I think effectively extirpate or remove that Vermine.' Amherst replied: 'You
will Do well to try to Inoculate the Indians by means of Blankets, as well
as to try every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable
Race. I should be very glad your scheme for Hunting them Down by Dogs could
take Effect, but England is at too great a Distance for importation of dogs,
to think of that at present..."

Fintan O'Toole

White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America

"Once the government forced Indians onto reservations,
they began banning their feasts and traditional foods. "These dances or
feasts, as they are called, ought to be discontinued",

( Secretary
of the Interior Henry Teller to the Commission on Indian Affairs in
1862...")

"We have a full right, by our own best wisdom, and then even by
compulsion, to dictate terms and conditions to them; to use constraint and
force; to say what we intend to do, and what they must and shall do....This
rightful power of ours will relieve us from conforming to or even consulting
to any troublesome extent, the views and inclinations of Indians whom we are
to mange....The Indian must be made to feel he is in the grasp of a
superior."

-George E. Ellis (a well-known Massachusetts clergyman and author,
expressed this a little more bluntly, perhaps, than others in his history of
Indian affairs published in 1882)

"Once we open the eyes of those children of the forest to their true
condition, (they will realize) the policy of the general government toward
the red man is not only liberal, but generous

-Andrew Jackson President of the United States), commenting on Indian
objections to his new policy of removing them to lands west of the
Mississippi River, 1830

"The Army is the Indian's best friend."

-General George Armstrong Custer 1870

"I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the
dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn't
inquire too closely into the case of the tenth."

-Theodore Roosevelt

"There are more American Indians alive today that there were when
Columbus arrived or at any other time in history. Does this sound like a
record of genocide?"

-Rush Limbaugh 'See , I Told You So, June 19,1992

"When the American government made the Hopi language
illegal in 1910 and began pushing "American" foods like white
flour and potatoes and roast beef and sugar, it not only spelled an end to a
historic cuisine, it undermined an entire way of life. Ironically,
corn-based cuisine of the Southwest survived, only to have the Europeans
actually make the plant itself almost inedible. Scientists in the area now
believe that the high-sugar corn hybrids introduced in the 1950s have helped
cause a massive outbreak in diabetes and other diseases because the Native
American's digestive system has trouble breaking down sugar. Prior to 1950
diabetes was unknown among native populations of the American Southwest. It
now has the highest rate in the world."

Stewart Lee

In the Devil's Garden

"Most of what he earned went into the pockets of small, ragged boys.
White boys. He could not understand why all the wealth he saw in the cities
wasn’t divided up among the poor. Among the Indians, a man who had plenty
of food shared it with those who had none. It was unthinkable for an Indian
to feed himself while others were going hungry within eyesight."

"An interesting fact is that there is no word signifying rich or
poor as having to do with much or little property. When an Indian says 'I am
rich' he means ' I have many friends." "I am poor' means "I
have but few."

John Wesley Powell

"Commissioner of Indian Affairs Cato Sells ordered
every Ute reservation superintendent and agent to "Prohibit the Sun
Dance or any dance of of a similar nature." In a 1914 telegram, he
demanded that the dance be stopped at the Uintah-Ouray Reservation, stating
"This dance is a great detriment to moral and industrial interest of
the Indians and cannot be allowed."

"Ute leaders were invited to a peace conference in 1854
at Taos, New Mexico, where Christopher "Kit" Carson was the Indian
agent. Gifts of blanket coats were given to Ute leaders. Every leader who
received a coat contracted smallpox...."

Jan Pettit

UTES

"….considering the want of such means as we have, they seem very
ingenious; for although they have no such tools, nor any such crafts,
sciences and arts as we , yet in those things they do, they show an
excellency of wit…..Whereby it may be hoped if means of good government be
used, they may in short time be brought to civility, and the embracing of
true religion."

Thomas
Harriot

(about
the Manitowocs)

"Among all the discoveries of America by the French and Spaniards, I
wonder why none of them was so kind to the world as to have kept a catalog
of the illnesses they found the natives able to cure."

John Lawson

History of North Carolina (1714)

"The Indians know how to cure very dangerous and perilous wounds and
sores by roots, leaves, and other little things."

Adrian van der Donck (1650)

"The Indians of the Great Plains may be thought among the most
remarkable of all the world’s warrior peoples. Between the middle of the
seventeenth century and the end of the eighteenth century, they acquired two
quite disparate instruments of warfare, the horse and the gun, assimilated
them into their culture, and combined their use into terrifyingly effective
military practice. It is difficult to think of any other pre-literate ethnic
group which has made so rapid and complete a transition from primitive to
sophisticated warrior Dom in so short a space of time."

John
KeeganFields
of Battle

"If we examine the matter with unbiased minds, we will find that
most of the Indian atrocities and tortures were copied from the white
men."

A.
Hyatt VerrillThe
Real Americans

"No Indian raid in the entire history of our country could equal the
unprovoked murders and massacres of peaceful friendly Indians that time and
time again were perpetrated by the whites."

A.
Hyatt VerrillThe
Real Americans

"It was from the Puritan Pilgrim Fathers that the Massachusetts
Indians learned to scalp their enemies."

H.H.
JacksonA
Century of Dishonor 1881

"Fleeing women, holding up their hands and praying for mercy, were
shot down; infants were killed and scalped in derision; men were tortured
and mutilated in a manner that would put to shame the savages of interior
Africa."

(Report of the Indian Peace Commission on the Sand Creek Massacre)
(1868)

"In our Indian wars, almost without exception, the first aggressions
have been made by white men."

(Findings of a presidential commission 1869 under President Grant)

"There must be in the Indians’ social bond something singularly
captivating, and far superior to be boasted of among us; for thousands of
Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those
Aborigines having from choice become Europeans."

Michel
Guillaume/Jean de Crevecour Letter from
an American Farmer

"The Indian’s religion and government are the same thing and fit
him like a glove-whereas our laws don’t fit us anywhere-nor our religion
either."

Edmund
Wilson

"A "Christianity" pugilist commented upon a recent article
of mine, grossly perverting the spirit of my pen. Still I would not forget
that the pale-faced missionary and the hoodooed aborigine are both God's
creatures, though small indeed their own conceptions of Infinite Love. A wee
child toddling in a wonder world, I prefer to their dogma my excursions into
the natural gardens where the voice of the Great Spirit is heard in the
twittering of birds, the rippling of mighty waters, and the sweet breathing
of flowers. If this is Paganism, then at present, at least, I am a
Pagan."

"My mother and grandmother told me how the Indians made a blockade
to protect the women and children when they were fighting against the
settlers. They said that John Mason came with a regiment of soldiers. First,
they didn't know what to do, whether to burn them out with their
torches......They went to the Baptist Church there in Old mystic and talked.
There were four or more ministers that were Protestant ministers to ask them
if it would be all right to do that. And so my grandmother and mother told
me that they said after talking about a half hour together with the other
ministers, they said, "Yes, Go ahead and do it. Get rid of them."
I think they called them the Canaanites. "Get rid of the Canaanites,
wicked people, " which was the Pequot Indians. So they did. They threw
torches and put it all aflame."

(Oral tradition handed down about the the Pequots )

Brett D. Fromson

The Inside Story of the Richest Indian Tribe in History

"Americans must take up life where the Red Indians, the Aztec, the
Maya, the Incas left it off….They must catch the pulse of life which
Cortez and Columbus murdered. There lies the real continuity; not between
Europe and the new states, but between the murdered Red America and the
seething White America."

D.H.
Lawrence

"So the Indian record is the bearer of one great message to the
world. Through his society, and only through his society, man experiences
greatness; through it he unites with the universe and God, and through it,
he is freed from all fear."

John
Collier

"In the production of consumer’s goods and their distribution to
give universal economic security, they succeeded more completely than any
nation before or since. (Incas)

Arthur
MorganNowhere
was somewhere 1946

"If the United States can participate in the creation of Israel as a
national homeland for the Jews in partial compensation for the genocide
committed against them by Hitler during the second World War, why is the
United States incapable of recognizing the Sioux nation as a sovereign over
its land in south Dakota in partial compensation for the genocide committed
against it at wounded Knee and other Massacres?"

Vine
Deloria Jr.Behind
the Trail of Broken Treaties

"They were friendly in their dispositions, honest to the most
scrupulous degree in their intercourse with the white man. Simply to call these people religious would convey but faint idea of the
deep hue of piety and devotion which pervades their whole conduct. Their
honesty is immaculate, and their purity of purpose and their observance of
the rites of their religion are most uniform and remarkable. They are
certainly more like a nation of Saints than a horde of Savages."

Captain Bonneville
(1834)
(about the Nez Pierce Indians)

"Just as we have exterminated feebler races by merely overliving
them, by monopolizing and absorbing, almost without conscious effort,
everything necessary to their happiness,-so may we ourselves be exterminated
at last by races capable of underliving us, of monopolizing all our
necessities; races more patient, more self-denying, more fertile, and much
less expensive for nature to support. These would doubtless inherit our
wisdom, adopt our more useful inventions, continue the best of our
industries-, perhaps even perpetuate what is most worthy to endure in our
sciences and our arts. But they would scarcely regret our disappearance any
more than we ourselves regret the extinction of the dinotherium or the
ichthyosaurus."

Lafcadio HearnOut
of the East 1895

"This, finally, is the punch line of our two hundred years on the
Great Plains: we trap out the beaver, subtract the Mandan, infect the
Blackfeet and the Hidatsa and the Assiniboin, overdose the Arikara; call the
land a desert and hurry across it to get to California and Oregon; suck up
the buffalo, bones and all; kill off nations of elk and wolves and cranes
and prairie chickens and prairie dogs; dig up gold and rebury it in vaults
someplace else; ruin the Sioux and Cheyenne and Arapaho and Crow and Kiowa
and Comanche; kill Crazy Horse, kill Sitting Bull; harvest wave after wave
of ‘immigrants’ dreams and send the wised-up dreamers on their wheat,
ship out the cattle; dig up the earth itself and burn it in power plants and
send the power down the line; dismiss the small farmers, empty the little
towns; drill the oil and the natural gas and pipe it away; dry up the rivers
and the springs, deep-drilled for irrigation water as the aquifer retreats.
And in return we condense unimaginable amounts of Treasure into weapons
buried beneath the land that so much Treasure came from-the weapons for
which our best hope might be that we will someday take them apart and throw
them away, and for which our next-best hope certainly is that they remain
humming away under the prairie, absorbing fear and maintenance, unused,
forever."

Article: Great Plains 111 By Ian
Frazier, New York Mag Mar 6, 1989

"We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling
hills, and winding streams with tangled growth, as ‘wild’. Only to the
white man was nature a ‘wilderness’, and only to him was the land ‘infested’
with ‘wild’ animals and ‘savage’ people. To us it was tame. Earth
was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the GREAT
MYSTERY. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy
heaped injustices upon us and the families we loved, was it ‘wild’ for
us. When the very animals of the forest began fleeing from his approach,
then it was that for us the ‘Wild West’ began."

Chief
Luther Standing Bear

"The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have
equal rights upon it."

Chief
Joseph of the Nez Pierce

"You are fools to make yourselves slaves to a piece of fat bacon,
some hard-tack, and a little sugar and coffee."

Sitting Bull

"When one’s heart is glad, he gives away gifts. It was given to us
by our Creator, to be our way of doing things, we who are Indians. The
Potlatch was given to us to be our way of expressing joy."

Agnes
AlfredKwakiutl
(1974)

"It would be a strange thing if Six Nations of ignorant savages
should be capable of forming a scheme for a union and be able to execute it
in such a manner that it has subsisted for ages and appears indissoluble;
and yet that a like union should be impractical for ten or twelve English
colonies."

Benjamin Franklin (commenting on the IroquoisConfederacy)

Over 500 years ago, the Iroquois formed a democratic representative
government called the "great Law of Peace", which guaranteed
freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right of women to
participate in government. Women had the power to nominate (and remove) each
of the 50 representatives to the central governing body, the grand council.
All opinions were respected, so decisions were made only by unanimous
agreement of all representatives. These representatives were chosen on the
basis of their ability, which was different from the Old World where leaders
were usually born into power.

"I am fed up with bureaucrats who try to pass off ‘rules &
regulations’ for organizational programs that will bring progress.

I am sick and tired of seeing my elders stripped of dignity and low-rated
in the eyes of their young.

I am disturbed to the point of screaming when I see American Indian youth
accepting the horror of ‘American conformity,’ as being the only way for
Indian progress. While those who do not join the great American mainstream
of personality less neurotics are regarded as ‘incompetents and problems.’

The National Indian Youth Council must introduced to this sick room of
stench and anonymity some fresh air of new Indianess. A fresh air of new
honesty, and integrity, a fresh air of new Indian idealism, a fresh air of
new Greater Indian America.

How about it? Let’s raise some hell!"

Clyde
Warrior-President National Indian Youth Council, ABC

Americans
Before Columbus II, No. 4, 1964

"Since we left Independence eight or ten days ago (see how quickly
he loses track of time), we have camped out every night, slept in bearskins,
and done our won cooking. I do not think that I have ever eaten or slept so
well in my life. We get a great deal of exercise…The weather is
magnificent…I am wearing a leather shirt, leggings, and moccasins, which I
find much more comfortable than shoes, when I am on horseback. I do not know
how I shall become reaccustomed to civilization. I have given up…all the
superfluous things which turn man into a dull brute…We do not spend one
cent for food and lodgings, since our beds are on our horses’ backs and
our meals are supplied by our own hunter’s skill. Water is delicious…food
is good…everything is seasoned with a hellish appetite, our good humor,
and long and original tales…Our physician has become a useless piece of
furniture."

Count
de Pourtales (1832)

"This treatment of the Indians is simply a fore-shadowing of the
treatment of all regressive humans who are not of the ruling technetronic
class of the state managed by behavioral scientists."

William Irwin Thompson

"They will have to freeze and starve a little more, I reckon, before
they will listen to common sense."

General William Sherman

"The whole business is a monotonous piece of treachery and
bloodstained villainy in which innocent persons suffer, while scoundrels who
cheat and swindle the poor Indians keep out of danger and fill their pockets
with money."

Josephine Meeker

"There is no use of making a long ado about the Indian question, the
only solution of the problem is extermination."

Boulder, Colorado Banner (Oct 1878)

"These primitive people are habitually and universally, the happiest
people I ever saw. They thoroughly enjoy the present, make no worry over the
possibilities of the future, and never cry over spilt milk…The Indian man
never broods, and in spite of that dreadful institution, polygamy, and the
fact that the wives were mere property, the domestic life of the Indian will
bear comparison with that of average civilized communities. The husband as a
rule, is kind; ruling, but with no harshness. The wives are generally
faithful, obedient, and industrious. The children are spoiled, and a
nuisance to all visitors. Among themselves, the members of the family are
perfectly easy and unstrained. It is extremely rare that there is any
quarreling among the wives. There is no such thing as nervousness in either
sex. Everybody in the lodge seems to do just as he or she pleases, and this
seems no annoyance to anybody else.

Colonel Dodge 33 years among our wild Indians

Statements by Indians

"Those were happy days, our bodies were strong and our minds healthy
because there was always something for both to do."

"We were nearly always happy!"

"At returning home to see the clans gathered, our hearts sang with
the thought of visiting friends we had not seen in a long time."

"It was good to live in those days."

"We know that we are related and one with all things of the heaven
& earth…the morning star and the dawn which comes with it, the moon of
the night and the stars of the heavens…Only the ignorant person…sees
many where there is really one…"

Black
Elk

"The North American Indian is by nature a symbolist, a mystic, and a
philosopher. Like most aboriginal peoples, his soul was ‘en rapport’
with the cosmic agencies manifesting about him."

Manly
P. HallSecret
Teachings of All the Ages

"The Red ‘Children of the Sun,’ do not worship the one God. For
them the One God is absolutely impersonal, and all the forces emanated from
that one God are personal. This is the exact reverse of the popular western
conception of a personal God and impersonal working forces in nature. Decide
for yourself which of these beliefs is the more philosophical."

James
Morgan Pryse

"Hiawatha enjoys the distinction of anticipating by several
centuries the late Woodrow Wilson’s charitable dream of a League of
Nations. Following the footsteps of Scholeraft, Longfellow confused the
historical Hiawatha of the Iroquois with Manabozho, a mythological hero of
the Algonquin and Ojibwas. Hiawatha, a chief of the Iroquois, after many
reverses and disappointments, succeeded in uniting the five great nations of
the Iroquois into the League of the Five Nations." The original purpose
of the League – to abolish war by substituting councils of arbitration –
was not wholly successful, but the power of the ‘silver chain’ conferred
upon the Iroquois a solidarity attained by no other confederacy of North
American Indian. Hiawatha, however, met the same opposition which has
confronted every great idealist, irrespective of time or race."

Manly
P. HallThe
Secret Teachings of the Ages

"Time in particular was the least of his concerns, and he never
thought to invent a gadget to measure it or to speed up the manufacturing
process. Clocks are only needed by those who endorse the idea of scheduled
lives or who believe that true productivity is only determined by
inventories taken at the end of a day."

Thomas
E. MailsThe
Mystic Warrior of the Plains

"In his manner and bearing, the Indian is habitually grave and
dignified, and in the presence of strangers he is reserved and silent.

The general impression is that the Indian is a stoic. Nothing can be
further from the truth. Stoicism is a ‘put on.’ In his won camp, away
from strangers, the Indian is a noisy, jolly, rollicking, mischief-loving
braggadocio, brimful of practical jokes and rough fun of any kind, making
the welkin ring with his laughter, and rousing the midnight echoes by song
and dance, whoops and yells.

He will talk himself wild with excitement, vaunting his exploits in love,
war, or the chase, and will commit all sorts extravagances while telling or
listening to an exciting story. In their everyday life Indians are
vivacious, chatty, fond of telling and hearing stories. Their nights are
spent in song and dance, and for the number of persons engaged, a permanent
(safe) Indian camp is at night the noisiest place that can be found."

Colonel Dodge

"We sometimes hear it said that the Indian lacked the genius to be
an inventor, and the claim put forward that what do seem to be inventions
were in some mysterious manner brought here, ready-made, from the old World.
The only weakness in this argument is that a list of useful inventions can
be compiled, none of which were known to the Old World"

"Religion is a farce to the white man. Christianity? He doesn’t
really believe in it himself."

Lisa
Waukau - Chippewa

"Injuns must either work or starve. They have never worked. They won’t
work now. And they never will work."

General William Tecumseh Sherman (an
interview in 1890)

"The white man woks like a slave all his life in order to retire, to
be able to loaf and hunt and fish. We already have this for which the white
man is working. So why should we adopt his ways and work all our life for
what we already have?"

(comments of an old Sioux from The New Indians)

"The European concept of leadership contains the belief of dividing
people against themselves so they can be easily controlled. If this be your
desire, mainly, to control, you have a ready made situating to build upon.
But if you choose the Indian concept of unity and solidarity for the benefit
of all and you believe in the public servant idea, then you have a long and
lingering preparation ahead of you. The Indian form of leadership may not
have the pomp and personality satisfactions that the European version of
leadership seems to thrive on, but it must be remembered the form of
government under which the general public lives was originally an Indian
form of government. Just because it has been warped out of shape by the
anxieties and paranoia that spewed out of the poor-houses and debtors
prisons of Europe all over the Good Mother Earth does it make a bad form of
government? Out of all the parts of the world that could be chosen to absorb
these self-inflicted illnesses, the Great Spirit chose the American Indian
to be the ‘goat’. After being downed for 573 years, the Indian Tribes
have not lost faith that they can rise again. This is your heritage in
leadership abilities…And the foundation on which to build-"A greater
Indian America."

From
American Aborigine National Indian Youth Council, IV, NO 1 1965
Unsigned
Editorial

"For many years, the Iroquois Confederacy guarded and protected the
Thirteen Colonies from invasion from the north. If it had not been for this
protection during the several French and English Wars, it would not have
been possible for the United States of America to begin…

Also, white leaders watched the operations of the Iroquois government and
learned union and democracy from it. Historians are now beginning to admit
what they must have known a long time age – that the government of the
United States is not pattered after something across the ocean, where they
believed in the divine right of kings and where the people had no voice, but
it is pattered after the government of the People of the longhouse, where
all people, women as well as men, are represented and control their
government."

Aren Akweks
(member
of the Wolf Clan of the people of Flint, otherwise known as the Mohawks,
part of the confederacy)

"The Iroquois were the greatest and most successful Indian warriors
ever known, and rulers of a great Indian civilization. By sheer ferocity and
organizational genius, they became kings of a domain of a million square
miles, larger than Europe itself, with laws and social customs which still
affect us today.

Frederic A Birmingham
Iroquois
Empire-Museum Mag. Mar/April 1981

"They are so ingenuous and free with all they have, that no one
would believe it who has not seen it; of anything that they possess, if it
be asked of them, they never say no; on the contrary, they invite you to
share it and show as much love as if their hearts went with it, and they are
content with whatever trifle be given them, whether it be a thing of value
or of petty worth. I forbade that they be given things so worthless as bits
of broken crockery and of green glass and lace-points, although when they
could get them, they thought they had the best jewel in the world."

(A
letter from Christopher Columbus to his sovereigns)

"It may be seen that due to their hundreds of years of isolation
from both East and West, the Amerindians may have preserved the essentials
of the Ancient Mysteries in their purest form."

Brad
SteigerMedicine
Power

"If I were an Indian, I often think that I would greatly prefer to
cast my lot among those of my people who adhered to the free open plain
rather than submit to the confined limits of a reservation, there to be the
recipient of the blessed benefits of civilization, with its vices thrown in
without stint or measure."

George
Armstrong Custer

"The precolonial Indians had welcomed the European with an
openhearted curiosity and innocent friendliness. He had offered his guest,
as he thought of the visitor, the hospitality that was an extension of his
tribal ethic. Powhatan, the father of Pocahontas, had said to Captain John
Smith: ‘Come not thus with your gunnes and swords, to invade as foes…What
will it availe you to take that perforce you may quietly have with love, or
to destroy them that provide your food?…Lie well, and sleepe quietly with
my women and children, laugh, and (I will) be merrie with you…’

Christopher Columbus had discovered the same hospitality. He was so awed
he thought he had come to the garden of a new Eden, where, he marveled, the
Indians were ‘so entirely our friends it is a wonder to see. Anything they
have, if it be asked for they never say no, but rather invite the person to
accept it, and show so much lovingness as though they would give their
hearts.’ So too, Americo Vespucci observed, with equal enthusiasm: ‘They
are so giving that it is an exception when they deny you anything…They
showed themselves very desirous of copulating with us Christians.’ And
Vespucci thought this ‘the full extreme of hospitality."

Stan
SteinerThe
New Indians
Harper
& Rowe Pub

"High officers advocate the policy of extermination of the Indians
and think the speedier, the better, its accomplishment."

New
York Times July 7, 1876

"Indians! There are no Indians left but me!"

Sitting Bull

"I want to say further that you are not a great chief of this
country…that you have no following, no power, no control, and no right to
any control. You are on an Indian reservation merely at the sufferance of
the government. You are fed by the government, clothed by the government,
your children are educated by the government, and all you have and are today
is because of the government. If it were not for the government you would be
freezing and starving today in the mountains. I merely say these things to
notify you that you cannot insult the people of the United States of America
or its committees…The government feeds and clothes and educates your
children now, and desires to teach you to become farmers, and to civilize
you, and make you as white men."

Senator John Logan to Sitting Bull
48th
Congress, 1st Session

"The Indians have been ruined by a competition which they had not
means of sustaining. They were isolated in their own country, and their race
constituted only a little colony of troublesome strangers in the midst of a
numerous and dominant people."

Alexis
de Tocqueville 1831

"’Dance,’ the prophet said; ‘everywhere, keep on dancing.’
This would hasten the day when the world would be renewed, the white man
destroyed, the game brought back, and the Indian restored to happiness with
all his kin. Because it promised a return of the dead, whites called it the
‘Ghost Dance.’ Wovoka, a Paiute, framed the belief after a revelation
that come when he was ill with a fever during an eclipse of the sun. Whites
took the rite for a war dance, not noting that women participated. And they
overlooked Wovokas’s tenet for the new life: ‘You must not…do harm to
anyone. You must not fight. Do right always."

The
World of the American Indian National
Geographic Society

"We behold (the red man) now on the verge of extinction…and soon
he will be talked of as a noble race who once existed but have passed
away."

(Cadet
George Armstrong Custer wrote for his "Ethics" class at West
Point)

"As the forerunners of Western civilization, creeping up the river
valleys and across the mountain passes, the trappers brought small-pox and
typhoid, they brought guns and whiskey and venereal disease, they brought
the puzzlement of money and the gleam of steel. And on their liquored breath
they whispered the coming of an unimaginable force, of a gathering shadow on
the eastern horizon, gorging itself on the continent as it pressed steadily
this way."

Hampton Sides

Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West

"These were objects of bright pride, to be admired in the newness of
their crisply carved lines, the powerful flow of sure elegant curves and
recesses-yes, and in the brightness of fresh paint. They told the people of
the completeness of their culture, the continuing lineages of the great
families, their closeness to the magic world of universal myth and
legend."

William Reid

"If one were only an Indian, instantly alert, and on a racing horse,
leaning against the wind, kept on quivering jerkily over the quivering
ground, until one shed one's spurs, for they needed no spurs, threw away the
reins, for there needed no reins, and hardly saw that the land before one
was smoothly shorn heath when horse's head and neck would be already
gone."

-Kafka

"It would be a strange thing if Six Nations of ignorant savages
should be capable of forming a scheme for a union and be able to execute it
in such a manner that it has subsisted for ages and appears indissoluble;
and yet that a like union should be impractical for ten or twelve English
colonies."

Benjamin Franklin (commenting on
the Iroquois Confederacy)

Whereas the confederation of the original thirteen Colonies into republic
was explicitly modeled upon the Iroquois Confederacy as were many of the
democratic principles which were incorporated into the Constitution itself….

The Congress…..acknowledges the historical debt which this Republic of
the United States of America owes to the Iroquois Confederacy and other
Indian nations for their demonstration of enlightened, democratic principles
of Government…

(Resolution introduced by Senator Inouye ,Sept
16, 1987, and passed by both houses in 1988)

"Caught now, in the midst of wars-against foreign disease,
missionaries, canned food, Dick & Jane textbooks, IBM cards, Western
philosophies, General Electric…I am talking about how we have been able to
survive insignificance."

Simon
Ortiz
Acoma
Pueblo Indian

"We always had plenty; our children never cried from hunger, neither
were our people in want…The rapids of rock river furnished us with an
abundance of excellent fish, and the land being very fertile, never failed
to produce good crops of corn, beans, pumpkins, and squashes…Here our
village stood for more than a hundred years, during al of which time we were
the undisputed possessors of the Mississippi Valley…Our village was
healthy and there was no place in the country possessing such advantages,
nor
hunting grounds better than those we had in possession. If a prophet had
come to our village in those days and told us that the things were to take
place which have since come to pass, none of our people would have believed
him."

"The white man does not understand the Indian for the reason that he
does not understand America. He is too far removed from its formative
processes. The roots of the tree of his life have not yet grasped the rock
and soil. The white man is still troubled with primitive fears; he still has
in his consciousness the perils of this frontier continent, some of its
vastness not ;yet having yielded to his questing footsteps and inquiring
eyes. He shudders still with the memory of the loss of his forefathers upon
its scorching deserts and forbidding mountain tops. The man from Europe is
still a foreigner and an alien. And he still hates the man who questioned
his path across the continent. But in the Indian the spirit of the land is
still vested; it will be until other men are able to divine and meet its
rhythm. Men must be born and reborn to belong. Their bodies must be formed
of the dust of their forefather’s bones."

Chief
Luther Standing Bear
(from his autobiography 1933)

"Conversation was never begun at once, nor in a hurried manner. No
one was quick with a question, no matter how important, and no one was
pressed for an answer. A pause giving time for thought was the truly
courteous way of beginning and conducting a conversation. Silence was
meaningful for the Lakota. Also in the midst of sorrow, sickness, and death,
or misfortune of any kind, and in the presence of the notable and the great,
silence was the mark of respect. More powerful than words was silence with
the Lakota."

-Chief Luther Standing Bear

"Heaven has not made them civilized; it is necessary that they
die."

Alexis
deTocquiville 1831

"In the production of consumer’s goods and their distribution to
give universal economic security, they succeeded more completely than any
nation before or since."

"In 1536 , the French explorer Jacques Cartier spent the winter in
Canada, where his crew became so sick from scurvy that 25 men died. The
Hurons came to their rescue by teaching them the cure: a tea made from the
boiled bark and needles of a common evergreen, the arbor vitae tree (which
contains vitamin C) Cartier wrote that the best medical techniques of Europe
were ineffective compared to Huron medicine. Cartier repaid the Huron chief
for his kindness by kidnapping him.

"To bring the Indian out of savagery and into citizenship we must
make him more intelligently selfish. A desire for property….is needed to
get the Indian out of the blanket and into trousers-and trousers with a
pocket in them, and with a pocket that aches to be filled with
dollars."

Board
of Indian Commissioners (1896)

"In the United States, the first "Indian war" in New
England was the "Pequot War of 1636" , in which colonists
surrounded the largest of the Pequot villages, set it afire as the sun first
began to rise, and then performed their duty: they shot everybody-men,
women, children, and the elderly-who tried to escape. As Pilgrim and
Colonist William Bradford described the scene: "It was a fearful sight
to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the
same, and horrible was the stink and scent of it; but the victory seemed a
secret sacrifice, and they (the Colonists) gave praise thereof to God, who
had wrought so wonderfully…."

Thom
HartmannThe
Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight

"It is a pleasing picture to see these people wading and sailing in
their shallow rivers. They are untroubled by the desire to pile up riches
for their children, and live in perfect contentment with their present
state, in friendship with each other, sharing all those things with which
God has so bountifully provided them."

Thomas Harriot (1585 official historian of the first English colony of
Roanoke, Virginia_

"They seek to be a People....it is much to be regretted that the
idea of Sovereignty should have taken such a deep hold of these
people."

-Thomas L. McKenney (Former Director of the Office of Indian
Affairs)

"....There had never been any reason for lack of food, except that
the ubiquitous white man, in his inscrutable desire to proclaim his
presence, slaughtered wild life. The great stretches of prairie and the wild
blackjack hills, seemed to inspire in him consciousness of his inferiority,
and he shouted his presence and his worth to the silent world that seemed to
ignore him.

Where the Indian passed in dignity, disturbing nothing and
leaving Nature as he had found her; with nothing to record his passage,
except a footprint or a broken twig, the white man plundered and wasted and
shouted; frightening the silences with his great, braying laughter and his
cursing. He was the atom of steam that had escaped from the pressure of the
European social system, and he expanded in this manner under the torch of
Liberty."

John Joseph Mathews

Wah' Kon-Tah: The Osage and the White Man's Road

"In the fifties the great extermination of the forest Indians of
South America began. It was the secret operation conducted behind the
world's back in the hitherto largely impenetrable forests of Paraguay,
Bolivia and Brazil, and unsuspected by the ordinary citizens of those
countries.

Due to the involvement of dictatorial governments in control
of a muzzled press, no estimate will ever be possible of the death roll
among the Indians of Paraguay and Bolivia. .....

Norman Lewis

The Missionaries: God against the Indians

"The Indians worked as slaves. They took me from my mother
when I was a child. Afterwards I heard that they hung my mother up all
night....She was very ill and I wanted to see her before she died.....When I got
back they thrashed me with a raw-hide whip....One day the IPS (Indian Protection
Service) agent called a carpenter and told him to make an oven for the
farmhouse. When the carpenter had finished the agent asked him what he wanted
for doing the job. The carpenter said he wanted an Indian girl, and the agent
took him to the (mission) school and told him to choose one. No-one saw or heard
any more of her....Not even the children escaped. From two years of age they
worked under the whip....There was a mill for crushing the cane, and to save the
horses they used four children to turn the mill....They forced the Indian
Otaviano to beat his own mother....The Indians were used for target practice.

There were missionaries within earshot when these things
happened."

Norman Lewis

The Missionaries: God against the Indians

"In reality , those in control of these Indian Protection Service
posts (where the majority of the atrocities had taken place) are North
American Missionaries-they are in all the posts-and they disfigure the
original Indian culture and enforce the acceptance of Protestantism."

O Globo (Brazilian Newspaper)

"....I believe that what most threatens the American Indian is
sacrilege, the theft of the sacred. Inexorably the Indian people have been,
and are being, deprived of the spiritual nourishment that has sustained them
for many thousands of years. This is a subtle holocaust, and it is is
ongoing....."

N. Scott Momaday

The Man Made of Words

"But the basic sense of guilt was at the heart of the
missionary problem and it was something that had to be manufactured, before
repentance and salvation-both equally obscure concepts to the Panare-could
be reached. The translators may have decided that the best way of tackling
this was by re-editing the Scriptures in such a way as to implicate the
Panare in Christ's death. Henry Corradini soon discovered that the New
Tribes Mission's version of the Crucifixion as arranged for Indian
consumption was at striking variance with that of the Bible. Gone were
Judas's betrayal. The Romans. The Last Supper, and the trial, Pontius Pilate
turning away to wash his hands, and the crown of thorns. He read on:

The Panare killed Jesus Christ

because they were wicked

Let's kill Jesus Christ

said the Panare

The Panare seized Jesus Christ.

The Panare killed in this way.

They laid a cross on the ground .

They fastened his hands and his feet

against the wooden beams, with nails.

They raised him straight up, nailed.

The man died like that, nailed.

Thus the Panare killed Jesus Christ."

Norman Lewis

The Missionaries

THERE WAS A TIME WHEN OUR FOREFATHERS OWNED THIS GREAT ISLAND by Red
Jacket (1805)

Friend and Brother; It was the will of the Great Spirit that
we should meet together this day. He orders all things; and has given us a
fine day for our council. He has taken his garment from before the sun, and
caused it to shine with brightness upon us. Our eyes are opened that we see
clearly, our ears are unstopped that we have been able to hear distinctly
the words you have spoken. For all these favors we thank the Great Spirit,
and Him only.

Brother, listen to what we say. There was a time when our
forefathers owned this great island. Their seats extended from the rising to
the setting sun. The Great Spirit had made it for the use of Indians. He had
created the buffalo, the deer, and other animals for food. He had made the
bear and the beaver. Their skins served us for clothing. He had scattered
them over the country and taught us how to take them. He had caused the
earth to produce corn for bread. All this He had done for His red children
because He loved them. If we had some disputes about our hunting-ground,
they were generally settled without the shedding of much blood.

But an evil day came upon us. Your forefathers crossed the
great water and landed on this island. Their numbers were small. They found
friends and not enemies. They told us they had fled from their own country
for fear of wicked men and had come here to enjoy their religion. They asked
for a small seat. We took pity on them, granted their request, and they sat
down among us. We gave them corn and meat; they gave us poison in return.

The white people, brother, had now found our country.
Tidings were carried back, and more came among us. Yet we did not fear them.
We took them to be friends. They called us brothers. We believed them and
gave them a larger seat. At length their numbers had greatly increased. They
wanted more land; they wanted our country. Our eyes were opened, and our
minds became uneasy. Wars took place. Indians were hired to fight against
Indians, and many of our people were destroyed. They also brought strong
liquor among us. It was strong and powerful, and has slain thousands.

Brother, our seats were once large and yours were small. You
have now become a great people, and we have scarcely a place left to spread
our blankets. You have got our country, but are not satisfied; you want to
force your religion upon us.

Brother, continue to listen. You say that you are sent to
instruct us how to worship the Great Spirit agreeably to His mind; and, if
we do not take hold of the religion which you white people teach, we shall
be unhappy hereafter. You say that you are right and we are lost. How do we
know this to be true? We understand that your religion is written in a book.
If it was intended for us, as well as you, why has not the Great Spirit
given to us, and not only to us, but why did He not give to our forefathers
the knowledge of that book, with the means of rightly understanding it? We
only know what you tell us about it, and having been so often deceived by
the white people, how shall we believe what they say?

Brother, you say there is but one way to worship and serve
the Great Spirit. If there is but one religion, why do you white people
differ so much about it? Why not all agree, as you can all read the book?

Brother, we do not understand these things: we are told that
your religion was given to your forefathers, and has been handed down from
father to son. We also have a religion which was given to our
forefathers, and has been handed down to us: it teaches us to be thankful
for all favors received, to love each other; and to be united: we never
quarrel about religion.

Brother, the Great Spirit made us all: but He has made a
great difference between His white and His red children: He has given us
different complexions and different customs. To you He has given the arts:
to these He has not opened our eyes. Since He has made so great a difference
between us in other things, why may He not have given us a different
religion? The Great Spirit does right: He knows what is best for His
children.

Brother, we do not want to destroy your religion, or take it
from you, We only want to enjoy our own.

Brother, we are told that have been preaching to the white
people in this place. These people are our neighbors. We will wait a little,
and see what effect your preaching has had upon them. If we find it makes
them honest, and less disposed to cheat Indians, we will then consider again
of what you have said.

Brother, you have now heard our answer, and this is all we
have to say at present. As we are about to part, we will come and take you
by the hand: and we hope the Great Spirit will protect you on your journey,
and return you safe to your friends."

Red Jacket (1805)

Black Hawk's surrender Speech...Sauk war chief 1832

"You have taken me prisoner with all my warriors. I am much grieved,
for I expected, if I did not defeat you, to hold out much longer, and give
you more trouble before I surrendered.

I tried hard to bring you into ambush, but your last general
understands Indian fighting. The first one was not so wise. When I saw that
I could not beat you by Indian fighting, I determined to rush on you, and
fight you face to face. I fought hard. But your guns were well aimed. The
bullets flew like birds in the air, and whizzed by our ears like the wind
through the trees in the winter.

My warriors fell around me; it began to look dismal. I saw my
evil day at hand. The sun rose dim on us in the morning, and at night, it sank
in a dark cloud, and looked like a ball of fire. That was the last sun that
shone on Black Hawk. His heart is dead, and no longer beats quick in his bosom.
He is now a prisoner to the white men; they will do with him as they wish. But
he can stand torture, and is not afraid of death. He is no coward. Black Hawk is
an Indian.

He has done nothing for which an Indian ought to be ashamed. He
has fought for his countrymen, the squaws and papooses, against white men, who
came, year after year, to cheat them and take away their lands. You know the
cause of our making war. It is known to all white men. They ought to be ashamed
of it. The white men despise the Indians, and drive them from their homes. But
the Indians are not deceitful. The white men speak bad of the Indian, and look
at him spitefully. but the Indian does not tell lies; Indians do not steal.

An Indian who is as bad as the white men could not live in our
nation; he would be put to death, and eaten up by the wolves. The white men
are bad schoolmasters; they carry false looks, and deal in false actions; they
smile in the face of the poor Indian to cheat him; they shake them by the hand
to gain their confidence, to make them drunk, to deceive them, and ruin our
wives.

We told them to let us alone; but they followed on and beset our
paths, and they coiled themselves among us like the snake. They poisoned us by
their touch. We were not safe. We lived in danger. We were becoming like them,
hypocrites and liars, adulterers, lazy drones, all talkers and no workers.

We looked up to the Great Spirit. We went to our great father.
We were encouraged. His great council gave us fair words and big promises, but
we got no satisfaction. Things were growing worse. There were no deer in the
forest. The opossum and beaver were fled; the springs were drying up, and our
squaws and papooses without victuals to keep them from starving; we called a
great council and built a large fire.

The spirit of our fathers arose and spoke to us to avenge our
wrongs or die....We set up the war-whoop, and dug up the tomahawk; our knives
were ready, and the heart of Black Hawk swelled high in his bosom when he led
his warriors to battle. He is satisfied. He will go to the world of spirits
contented. He has done his duty. His father will meet him there, and commend
him.

Black Hawk is a true Indian, and disdains to cry like a woman.
He feels for his wife, his children and friends. But he does not care for
himself. He cares for his nation and the Indians. They will suffer. He laments
their fate. The white men do not scalp the head; but they do worse-they poison
the heart, it is not pure with them. His countrymen will not be scalped, but
they will , in a few years, become like the white men, so that you can't trust
them, and there must be, as in the white settlements, nearly as many officers as
men, to take care of them and keep them in order.

Farewell my nation. Black Hawk tried to save you, and avenge your
wrongs. He drank the blood of some of the whites. He has been taken prisoner,
and his plans are stopped. he can do no more. he is near his end. His sun is
setting; and he will rise no more. Farewell to Black Hawk."

-Black Hawk; Aug, 27,1832...Surrender Speech

"Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove, has been hallowed
by some sad or happy event in days long vanished.....and at eventide they
grow shadowy of returning spirits. And when the last Red Man shall have
perished, the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among white man,
these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your
children's children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the
shop, upon the highway, or alone in the silence of the pathless woods, they
will not be alone.....At night when the streets of your cities and villages
are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning
hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. The White
Man will never be alone."

-Chief Sealth (Seattle)

"Where can I go

That I might live forever?

The old fathers have gone to the spirit-land.

That we might live together?"

-Flying Crow

***************

Book: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" by Charles
C. Mann

Book: "Native American Architecture" by Peter Naboko and Robert
Easton

Book: "The Surrounded" by D'Arcy McNickle

Book: "Wind from an Enemy Sky" by D'Arcy McNicle

Book: "Winter in the Blood" by James Welch

Book: "Halfbreed: The Remarkable True Story of George Bent-Caught between
the Worlds of the Indian and the White Man" by D.F. Halaas & A.E. Masich

Book: "American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of
Identity and Culture" by Joanne Nagel